Junio 2009 Archives

you should always be cautious when you read these things because i am not necessarily cautious when i write them.
if you need to tell me about it, well, that is what the comment field is for...

Where I am coming from

i want the people in the class to see how much it hurts that they can take a class, write a paper and get to choose whether or not to forget it afterward. But I will always and have always see things, brown things versus white things, culture things, popping out at me, threatening to out me to my chicana friends or students, threatening to out me to my white friends, threatening to make me more and more undesirable, abandonable, destroy me, hurt me and I have always had to choose what was realest, what about me was going to help or hurt and always for another person.

The choice to straddle the cultures has been made for me, it was made for me the day my eyes turned from blue to brown, and many other days: the day they realized my hair wouldn't lie down because it was thick and dark, the day they heard my first word in English, the day we decided to have a sweet 16 instead of a quinceanera because none of my friends would know what was going on, the days I wore sleek sailor dresses rather than white lace to the family reunions, the day my mother lost the culture war because she didn't know who she was, or who she married because my father never had words to tell her, the day my mother remarried a man she affectionately referred to as blue eyes, the day she hyphenated my name so Perez wouldn't stand alone, the day she told my sister and I not to speak Spanish, the day my grandparents decided it was cute, rather than necessary that we learn to speak their native tongue in order to communicate with them, the day my grandmother was surprised I wanted her to teach me to make tortillas or albondigas or cocido... there were so many times I was told to turn toward white experiences as though they were all that was necessary for me to define myself and so many other days those white experiences didn't make sense. The tacos my step dad made were not anything like the tacos my grandmother made, nor was the chili. I learned to eat beans or juevos with tortillas, rather than forks and knives and then became nervous if I went to a friends' house and tortillas weren't there. I quieted the little voice in my head that asked, Who doesn't keep tortillas in the house? That is crazy! What do you eat? Because my mother decided they were optional.
Martin is Mexican, what are you, what was your maiden name?

That class is so good for white people, Dr. Hollins will hate you the first day....

Do you feel more Mexican because you married one?

Why don't you speak Spanish then?

Why don't you talk about yourself?

Oh, so you're not really Mexican.

Have you ever been to Mexico, I have, to Cabo, aside from the poverty it was great!

What is Basque?

That is such a racist thing to say, you're not Mexican, you shouldn't talk like that!

Well, if you're Latina then you...

So you're only half.

Only half?! If only I were only half! If only the Hispanic culture didn't poison the nasty sweet glory in all my successful attempts to be white, if only I felt half white as much as half the time, if only it hurt just half of me, just one part of me when you are surprised by my values, allegiances, biases or snobbery of your so-called Mexican food, if only you were only half intimidated by the half intimidating half exotic half of me suddenly yelling at you with the emphasis on the wrong syllable, if only you saw me as only half white. If only there had been white friends ready to take me in when my brown friends laughed me out of the room, if only there had been brown friends around to tell the white girls they were offensive beyond belief with their smells and foods and wide eyes. If only I were bouncing back and forth like a tennis ball rather than always muddled and angry at myself for not picking a side, a culture, a color, a perspective on race relations, and neighborhood regentrification turf wars.
They will make of me whatever they make of me, if that is what it costs me to stay true to whom I am, confused as I may be. And I will gladly apologize if I turn out to be sorry but I will not apologize for the feelings they will have to bear on their own. I will no longer bury my color because I am afraid of their suspicion, I will no longer shy away from their questions or let my voice fade off into a whisper when they push for answers just because they want me to relieve their confusion because I am a confusing person, and being with me will cost you clarity. They have no right to judge me, they don't even know me. It will cost them their categories and stereotypes. even if they can't understand how well, how fully, how carefully i have learned to straddle the fence between their experiences and mine so well that they never knew i was doing it, i value the truth, maybe not their truth, but mine, and i have to figure out a way to say so or stay lonely and mean for another two weeks, maybe longer. I'm done doing you all favors and making things simple so you can understand.
and when i explain that things are complex with me, it will be in my own voice.

about love and the million tiny risks, like papercuts on the sides of fingers.

so can I tell you now about the waking dreams I've been having?
I dreamed a tree fell down and there was a nest with eggs that needed saving.
I dreamed you wrote me a letter and your girlfriend signed it.
I dreamed I had a nightmare I couldn't remember because I was always in it, right now.

I dreamed I wrote a letter to punish some women who have recently hurt me.

~

I have been treated badly because of the race question my whole life. and so if you want to imagine the color of my skin, imagine instead that I am more like a burn victim. The blisters and bubbling flesh breaking and bleeding. Imagine that I have no fingerprints by which you could identify my limp body, imagine the hairs on my arms are coarse and my lips are swollen, without the lovely lines of a pucker.

Imagine that I have begun recently to warn others not to touch me unless they can do so gently, that I have spoken of my vulnerability with those I thought I could trust. And then imagine that in some cases, it was for naught.

I was angry, hurting so badly. I was weeping and crumpled and hoping those who had been so careless with me would hurt as much as I am.

So when I woke yesterday I composed the letter in my mind and wrote it out in my own blood. The problem was that I had to pick a scab to do so. If you know me well, you know that I am not a scab picker. I don't like to pick at chipped paint or scotch tape. I don't like to bite off hangnails or pull the strips of skin around my nail beds. I realized that this scab-picking simply was not me, not who I have ever been, not who I am, not who I want to be and probably not who I ever will be, if I can help it.

I lay in bed and heard one bird sing.

There was a small whistle and a sort of chipping away at the silence. The sound was high and sweet and I thought of stitches. I thought of new skin, quilted into place, like a patchwork quilt of my grandmother's aged and scarred and wrinkled whitish skin, my mother's cold and freckled skin, my father's acne and stubble, my grandfather's shiny and lined, calloused, and ashy skin, my sister's pale reddening cheeks, my beloved stepmother's crow's feet, my own skin, so different even from theirs, that smooths and dries out, and pales in the cold weather, then shines and darkens like stained oak in the summer.
I thought of a cousin's cafe con leche skin, another cousin's milky white arms holding her tiny white baby. I thought of my niece, the one we call Peach because she is just the right color, and the one we call Peanut because her lovely soft shell crushes easily and under it we find the salty roasted wisdom she holds close to her heart. I remembered the yellow skin on the one we call AH-gee, how we gave her to the light and it healed her, and the perfect curves of the skin that stretches not too tightly over their older sister Em's dexterous digits when she eats a whole peach without making any mess at all.

That little bird chirped away at the silence and her friends joined in because the sun was rising and warming their cedar tree. I thought of the way thread slips through the hole in the fabric, thought of a needle and string in the beak of a bird, like it belongs there. I thought of birds working, of their song tying my skin down over my bare soul and I knew that there was beauty enough to cover my exposed bones and heart.
I thought of birds building nests from pampas grass, from down and feathers, from dog fir and twigs and thought I might yet be healed, piece by piece, the way birds know best.

I thought of tree bark and surface tension, all the things that cover all the other things and began to be glad for all these thoughts and the skin over my pinkish lips that speak them, my pale neck skin stretched over the larynx that screams at the moon, my pink fingertips the color of raw-chicken meat that type them, my cheeks that redden when you read them. I was glad for myself. and for you. and I thought of all the pain I had wanted, only an hour before, to inflict on those who have hurt me so badly.

And I knew I didn't want them to hurt because of me.
Though I have heard it so many times I began to believe it for the first. Maybe it was because I was ready to hear it, or maybe because I was telling myself, or maybe because I just didn't need to bleed over this anymore and wanted to heal.
I knew they were hurting enough. There was no doubt in my mind that they would be lonely without me in their lives, at their dinner tables and I felt compassion growing in me.

I leaned into my husband lying next to me and felt the heavily furred skin on his hand, thought of the callous from his wedding ring, just above the life-line on his palm and how hard he works to be married to me, how proudly he wears the marks of our life together, then I thought of the skin on the backs of his hands, already turning brown and sweet like caramel in the first sunny days of Seattle summer, turning colors the way California foothills turn, the way skin turns colors, turns toward, turns.

Do they have skin like this? Do they know they do? Do they lean into the skin of loved ones, they have chosen not to think of mine, or to feel what it is like to wear it, but do they feel the skin of loved ones? Do they feel loved?

To be sure, I doubted and worried for them, for their beautiful faces and thought they must have wounds I will never know, never wear and skin that I may never touch, never wear, never appreciate.

Even now as I write, I am more and more willing to hope to cry for them. I feel my heart turning or softening, and as the wound closes I begin to think of opening it up again, all by myself so that I may stay in the pain, to be with them in theirs. I begin to wonder if the tears I cried for myself, the weeping into a friend's blood-red tee shirt, or wiped away with my own soft hands, will be replaced with tears for them. I wondered if what was initially a sadness for myself and my feelings about being rejected would turn into an even deeper sadness over the fact that we do not have each other in this moment. And I imagined, instead of their faces set against me, their smiles, or their tears falling down their faces.

Though I am so very afraid to move my body or my mouth in a way that will bring all this about, at least my heart will go there and that feels like a little healing and it will be enough for now.